Investing your dollars in digital marketing but don’t have a well-defined digital marketing strategy? We can provide you five solid reasons to get started on your Digital Marketing Plan right now!
- You don’t know where you’re headed or what exactly you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (capturing new customers or solidifying relations with current customers?)
- You’re not aware of your online market share, have little or no understanding of the online marketplace and you’re not completely in tune with customer behavior
- Without a proper strategy in place, you don’t yet have a value proposition that differentiates your services and encourages customer engagement
- You don’t know how best you can integrate digital marketing with traditional marketing and response channels
- You could be duplicating efforts or using the same tools to do similar online marketing tasks.
Setting your objectives
Convinced that you need a digital marketing strategy plan? Start off by defining your objectives first. Here’s what you’ll need to factor in: (a) understand what your competition is up to and get an idea about your industry’s online competitive landscape (b) develop strategies that enhance awareness about your brand, help you identify revenue streams and discover tools/solutions that aid customer engagement (c) establish a roadmap for digital initiatives and channels based on your business priorities and available resources (d) recognize the digital capabilities you need to manage and implement your digital marketing plan successfully.
Creating a digital marketing strategy framework
With a framework in place, you can implement digital marketing initiatives and map progress efficiently. A typical framework will include the following elements:
Digital objective/mission – This will define in what way the digital channels and efforts should be contributing to the overall marketing campaign and/or your business priorities. Examples: adding more customers, saving costs, greater client satisfaction, strengthen brand identity, etc
Defining the ‘what’ and ‘which’ of strategy implementation – Here, you will decide the approach to fulfilling your mission/objective. That is, whether you’ll prioritize your mobile digital presence over social or web. What key performance indicators and targets to set, which channel (SEM , email etc) to prioritize, and what kind of sites to develop (lead generation, ecommerce, brand marketing, publishing/content) are other questions that need answering.
Leveraging digital marketing’s interactive capabilities: You want to know how to tap into digital marketing’s vast potential to promote your offerings in a way that maximizes results. For instance, figure out how you can expand digital marketing’s promotional benefits to further personalize your brand, grow your promoter base, persuade prospects in a more compelling way and convert more leads to customers.
Measuring results: Measuring ROI and optimizing efforts are essential to any digital marketing strategy.
nitiatives prioritization – Digital Marketing Roadmap
You can present an initiatives roadmap that discusses and prioritizes functions and features of your digital marketing framework, to your stakeholders. You could start using a simplified approach, where you map initiatives based on: impact of objectives versus simplicity of implementation (please see below)
“Impact” is based on the estimated effectiveness of a combination of Channel + Initiative to reach a specific marketing Objective. For example:
Marketing Objective:
- Develop a community of “Experts” around my product…
Channel:
Initiative:
- A YouTube channel were prospective “Experts” can upload their videos explaining best usages of the product. A panel of actual Experts (category influencers) vote and award the badge of “Expert” to the winner.
Metrics:
- Number of Uploaded videos, Total Social Mentions of the Initiative, Sentiment towards the initiative.
“Simplicity” is estimated based on how easy is to implement one particular initiative considering enablers such as: budget, technology, people, skills, etc.
Some (… even poor) criteria are better than no criteria.
